


The One In Which No Time Actually Passes

by knitmeapony



Series: Chicago Fifth Star [2]
Category: Changeling: The Lost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-05
Updated: 2015-05-05
Packaged: 2018-03-29 05:12:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3883618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knitmeapony/pseuds/knitmeapony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ace as Hours, for the first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One In Which No Time Actually Passes

Ace wasn’t actually sure what building this was, but it was tall and abandoned, and sitting here on the edge of the roof she could see all the way to Navy Pier if she wanted.  The wind blew her hair out of her eyes, and at just the right moment she focused, she slowed everything down, and then it  _stopped._

_There._

The city stretched out below her, silent for once.  She breathed in the cool spring air and leaned back on her hands, the sandstone of her skin grating against the bricks beneath her, wearing it down,  _winning._

 _Spring.  Of course it’s spring.  Before it was summer, my durance was autumn, my return was winter, so of course it’s fuckin’ spring._ Everything was in perfect progression, everything was in order.

She’d visited everyone she’d wanted to already – or well, she would, but she had, and she will, and verb tenses were going to be a problem, apparently.   _Eh, fuck English_.  Maybe she’d invent something new, a conlang with an incredibly complicated verbal circumfix and no gender markers.  She certainly had the time.

That made her grin, just shy of laughing, and she scuffed her hands against the cement slab beneath her thighs.

This was a moment, and she wanted to remember the moment.  There was very little in the way of perfection in the world, but she had found something near to it.  She sat on the top of the world, and looked out at a city perfectly still.  She sat in the cool spring air, and she savored the fact that she wasn’t _hungry_  any more.  For so long, that’d been what had defined her.  Hunger and addiction and longing had been her whole life, from the time she was old enough to realize, well, anything.  

She’d burned from the inside.  She’d burned so many fucking things to stay alive.

Today, though, she wasn’t  _hungry_  anymore, and she hadn’t gorged.  She wasn’t overfull, she wasn’t inebriated, she was  _aware_.  She was awake and quite real.  She  _was_ , she absolutely simply  _was_  and  _used to be_ and she  _is_  and she  _will be_  and that was enough.

Things were  _enough_ , and there was no language in which she could express what a  _relief_  that was.  Things were enough for her, and she was enough.   _She was enough_.

She’d said it so often –  _we are enough, Peter_ , _we don’t need the Realms we don’t need the oaths we don’t need any of it_  – and she’d always  _believed_  she was right but she’d never  _known_  if she was right.  And now here she was, edges filed off, corners sanded down, the cancer of the  _fae_  out of her system and… and she was  _enough_.

She was  _enough_ , and in this moment, when everything was perfectly still, this moment she had chosen, everyone was  _safe_.  Everyone and every thing, right now, in this moment, every piece that mattered, it was all in order.  There were pieces that  _mattered_ , on a real cosmological universe-affecting level – that was a relief to know, too.

There were pieces of this city that were  _hers_ , her absolute fucking right to protect, her absolute right to build and grow, her absolute right to tear down, her absolute right to let pass, her absolute right to hold.  But more, so much more than that,  _she was a part of this city_.  For the first time since she’d been born, she felt herself click into place.  

Chicago had always been home, but homes aren’t always welcoming.  Her home had left her bloodied and bruised and rejected more times than she could count – but now she had a  _place_.  She had a place and a home and a family, one that had come to her rather than one she had to bleed and fight and claw for.   

She raised a hand to her throat, remembering the collar that’d been there for so long.  There was nothing there, now, and she stroked the skin over her carotid artery, committing that to memory too.   _Freedom._  For all that now there were duties happily taken and promises joyfully kept and burdens cheerfully carried, there was also  _freedom_.  She was no longer hunted or beholden, not in any of the old ways.  She  _chose_  this, and she savored everything that  _this_  was.

And there it was, that’s what she wanted to fucking remember: it was  _spring_ , and she  _wasn’t hungry anymore_ , and  _she was enough_ , and  _there were things that mattered_ , and  _she was free_.

She belonged to the city, and the city belonged to her. 

She let the moment hang, let the stars and the moon shine down, and she committed it all to memory.

This all happened, all at once, all in one breathless moment, and at the end of it she let her eyes pull to the west, to one of the places where she could see the  _wrongness_ , one of the unfamiliar twists of architecture that made the Shadow City twist her stomach.

“Right,” she said, and she slapped both hands against the stone she’d been gripping.  The city below her seemed to respond as time flowed normally again and it swiftly shuddered back to life.  “Time to get to fuckin’ work.”


End file.
